Three days after the House Benghazi Committee released 60 newly uncovered emails between Clinton and Sid Blumenthal related to Libyan policy given to the committee by Blumenthal, the State Department announces Clinton didn’t provide them with the Blumenthal emails either. Clinton has claimed she gave all her work-related emails to the State Department. However, department officials say they are no longer certain she complied with their order to turn over all work emails.

The department confirms that ten emails and parts of five others from Blumenthal regarding Benghazi could not be located in their records, but that the 45 other, previously unreleased Libya-related Blumenthal emails published by the committee were in their records. When asked about the discrepancy, Clinton campaign spokesperson Nick Merrill seems to dispute it, saying, “She has turned over 55,000 pages of materials to the State Department, including all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal.” (The Associated Press, 6/25/2015)

In August 2015, The New York Times will comment, “The Clinton campaign has not explained the discrepancy.” (The New York Times, 8/8/2015) More of Clinton’s work emails will be discovered later, including some found by the State Department. (The Hill, 3/24/2016)

Although Drumheller retired from the CIA in 2005 after 25 years of service, he seems to have had access to intelligence information that got passed on to Clinton through emails sent to her by private citizen Sid Blumenthal. Drumheller and Blumenthal were business partners at least in 2011, and there are suspicions that during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, Blumenthal essentially ran a private intelligence service for Clinton using information from Drumheller. (The New York Times, 8/2/2015)

John Schindler, a former NSA counterintelligence officer, will later claim that Drumheller “was never particularly popular at CIA and he left Langley under something of a cloud. His emails to Mr. Blumenthal, which were forwarded to Ms. Clinton, were filled with espionage-flavored information about events in Libya. In many cases, Mr. Drumheller’s reports were formatted to look exactly like actual CIA reports, including attribution to named foreign intelligence agencies. How much of this was factual versus Mr. Drumheller embellishing his connections is unclear.” Schindler adds that answers to questions about Drumheller’s role may never be known due to his death. (The New York Observer, 10/19/2015)

It is reported that much of her testimony focuses on how over half of Clinton’s emails from her time as secretary of state were deleted, since Mills was part of the process. (Politico, 9/4/2015)

Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal recently gave some of his work-related email correspondence with Clinton to the committee, and all or part of 15 of them had not been handed over by Clinton, despite Clinton’s claim that she had turned over all her work-related emails. Mills could not explain how those had been missed.

Mills also says she was not involved in setting up Clinton’s private server, nor was she part of the decision to move it to the care of the Platte River Networks company in mid-2013.

She also says that she “overwhelmingly” used a State Department email for work, but she admits she did use her private email account when she was at home or overseas. (Politico, 9/3/2015)

She claims that many people at the State Department knew Clinton was using a personal email account for her government work.

She says that neither she nor Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall had personally gone through Clinton’s over 60,000 emails to determine which to hand over and which to delete. Instead, a member of their legal staff who was reporting to them did it. (This is a likely reference to lawyer Heather Samuelson.) (The New York Times, 9/3/2015)

On October 7, 2015, Representative Trey Gowdy (R), the chair of the House Benghazi Committee, releases an excerpt of a Clinton email that he claims shows Clinton mentioned the identity of a top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intelligence source in Libya. The March 18, 2011, email between Clinton and Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal states, “Tyler spoke to a colleague currently at CIA, who told him the agency had been dependent for intelligence from [redacted due to sources and methods].” “Tyler” is Tyler Drumheller, a CIA operative until 2005.

Gowdy claims the redaction in that sentence is “the name of a human source.” He adds, “Armed with that information, Secretary Clinton forwarded the email to a colleague—debunking her claim that she never sent any classified information from her private email address.” (Yahoo, 10/8/2015) (House Benghazi Committee, 10/7/2015)

However, eleven days later, Newsweek reports that CIA has informed the committee that it reviewed 127 emails between Clinton and Sid Blumenthal, including that one, and none of them were deemed classified. Representative Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, criticizes Gowdy for making inaccurate claims: “The problem with your accusation, as with so many others during this investigation, is that you failed to check your facts before you made it, and the CIA has now informed the [Benghazi] Committee that you were wrong.” (Newsweek, 10/18/2015)

It does not appear the committee has released more text of the email in question since.

While she was at the State Department she was aware that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account for all her email communications. However, although many higher-ups in the State Department know Clinton used a personal email account, none of them knew that she used it exclusively.

Asked if she ever had any conversation with Clinton “about using personal email versus official email” prior to Clinton becoming secretary of state, Abedin replies, “It doesn’t mean it’s out of the realm of possibility, but I don’t recall any specific conversations with her.”

When asked if she was aware that Clinton’s email account was maintained on a private server, she replies, “I know it was an email address that was provided by the IT [information technology] person in President Clinton’s office. [She later identifies this as Justin Cooper.] I’m not certain that I was aware of what server it was on or not on.” However, she says she was “absolutely” certain it wasn’t on a State Department server.

She had three email accounts: a state.gov one, a Yahoo mail one, and a clintonemail.com one.

Anyone who asked for Clinton’s private email address was given it, and she doesn’t recall a time when a person was denied it.

Sidney Blumenthal’s memoir of his four years as a presidential assistant to Bill Clinton. (Credit: public domain)

She knew Sid Blumenthal well from her earlier work under the Clintons going back to when Bill Clinton was president, she never saw him at the State Department and didn’t have communication with him by phone or email. She was only dimly aware of how often he emailed Clinton because she would print out his emails for Clinton sometimes.

She had a “top secret” security clearance while she worked at the State Department but it lapsed shortly after she left the department in early 2013 and she doesn’t have one anymore. (House Benghazi Committee, 10/16/2015)

Sid Blumenthal is a Clinton confidant, reporter, and Clinton Foundation employee in the years Clinton is secretary of state. The interview will remain secret until it’s mentioned in a September 2016 FBI report.

The FBI identified at least 179 out of the over 800 emails that Blumenthal sent to Clinton containing information in an intelligence memo format. The State Department determined that 24 Blumenthal memos that contained information currently classified as “confidential,” as well as one classified as “secret” both currently and when it was sent.

Blumenthal tells the FBI that the content of the memos was provided to him from a number of different sources, including former US government officials and contacts, as well as contacts within foreign governments.

Blumenthal’s memos contained a notation of “CONFIDENTIAL” in all capital letters. He claims this meant the memos were personal in nature and didn’t refer to the US government category of classified information at the “confidential” level.

This is notable because at the time Clinton is secretary of state, Blumenthal is a private citizen (and journalist and Clinton Foundation employee) with no government security clearance at the time. Dozens of other Blumenthal emails have been partly redacted, but here are the four fully redacted ones, with only the subject headings known:

June 23, 2009, titled “N. Ireland/Shaun.” This is a likely reference to Shaun Woodward, who is the secretary of state for Northern Ireland at the time.

June 20, 2011, titled “memo hrc Bahrain/Iran.” This is redacted because it contains information related to foreign activities.

August 3, 2012. This email is entirely redacted except for the statement that the email contains information from “sources with access to the highest levels of the Governments and institutions.”

Twenty-two emails have been deemed “top secret,” so no details whatsoever about them have been made public. It is not known if any of them were sent by Blumenthal. (The Daily Caller, 1/30/2016)

The New York Observer comments, “How Mr. Blumenthal, who held no US Government position after January 2001, when Bill Clinton left the White House, had access to classified information a decade after that is not explained.” Furthermore, “Since Mr. Blumenthal’s emails were illegally accessed by a private hacker [Guccifer, in March 2013], they can be safely assumed in to be in the hands of numerous foreign intelligence services.” (The New York Observer, 2/1/2016)

The Romanian hacker nicknamed Guccifer, whose real name is Marcel-Lehel Lazar, has been recently interviewed by Fox News. He claims for the first time that after breaking into the email account of Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal in March 2013, he traced Clinton’s emails back to her private email server.

He tells Fox News, “For me, it was easy […] easy for me, for everybody.” He says he accessed her server “like twice.” He adds, “For example, when Sidney Blumenthal got an email, I checked the email pattern from Hillary Clinton, from Colin Powell, from anyone else to find out the originating IP [Internet Protocol address]. […] When they send a letter, the email header is the originating IP usually…then I scanned with an IP scanner.”

He said he then used some Internet programs to determine if the server was active and which ports were open. However, the server’s contents did “not interest” him at the time. “I was not paying attention. For me, it was not like the Hillary Clinton server, it was like an email server she and others were using with political voting stuff.”

If he breached the server, it appears he didn’t fully understand what he was seeing, and he has not claimed to have uncovered more of Clinton’s emails. He is interviewed from a US prison and has no documents to back up his claim. However, Fox News reports, “While [his] claims cannot be independently verified, three computer security specialists, including two former senior intelligence officials, said the process described is plausible and the Clinton server, now in FBI custody, may have an electronic record that would confirm or disprove Guccifer’s claims.”

Cybersecurity expert Morgan Wright comments, “The Blumenthal account gave him a road map to get to the Clinton server. […] You get a foothold in one system. You get intelligence from that system, and then you start to move.”

Guccifer claims he wants to cooperate with the US government, adding that he has hidden two gigabytes of data that is “too hot” and is “a matter of national security.”

The Clinton campaign responds, “There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell. In addition to the fact he offers no proof to support his claims, his descriptions of Secretary Clinton’s server are inaccurate.” (Fox News, 5/4/2016)

Politico reports, “An internal FBI review of Clinton’s email records did not indicate traces of hacking” according to “a source familiar with the situation.” (Politico, 5/4/2016)

Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal is asked if the FBI has interviewed him as part of their Clinton email investigation. He replies, “You know, I don’t really want to talk about an ongoing inquiry right now.” He says he will wait to speak until after the investigation is over. (The Hill, 5/9/2016)

The Romanian hacker nicknamed Guccifer pleads guilty in a US court to charges of identity theft and unauthorized access to protected computers. At a plea hearing before US District Court Judge James Cacheris in Alexandria, VA, he admits that he broke into email and social media accounts of about 100 US citizens between 2012 and 2014.

Guccifer is best known for breaking into the email account of Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal in March 2013 and thus publicly revealing Clinton’s private email address. He could face up to seven years in prison in the US, on top of the seven years he is already serving in Romania.

He is due to be sentenced on September 1, 2016. However, it is alleged that his guilty plea is part of a deal to cooperate with the US government, possibly including the FBI’s Clinton investigation. It has been reported that he will cooperate with the government in other investigations and be “reasonably available for debriefing and pre-trial conferences as the US may require.” He also has agreed to turn over any documents or other materials “that may be relevant to investigations or inquires.” (LawNewz, 5/25/2016)

In a Fox News interview, Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal is asked if he ever had security clearance when exchanging emails with Clinton, given that many of her emails were later deemed to contain classified material. He responds, “I was her friend, and I had no security clearance, nor did I seek it, nor did anyone ever send me anything that was classified. So I had no access to, nor did I send or receive any classified material.”

Curiously, he also comments about the Romanian hacker nicknamed Guccifer, who broke into his email inbox in 2013: “Marcel Lazar is a Romanian. He worked from a Russian server. He may well be part of a Russian information operation.” (Fox News, 6/11/2016)

A sample of a meeting with donors and loyalists that were omitted from Clinton’s official calendar. (Credit: The Associated Press)

In August 2013, the Associated Press (AP) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Clinton’s calendar and schedules from the State Department. Afteryears of delays and denials, AP recently got about one-third of Clinton’s planning schedules from when she was secretary of state, and will be getting more.

A comparison of the planning schedules with Clinton’s 1,500-page official calendar shows “at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors, and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded,” or for which the names of those she met were omitted. At least 114 outsiders attended these meetings. Only seven meetings were replaced on the calendar by other events, while more than sixty meetings were either omitted entirely or described briefly as “private meetings” without mention of who attended. The missing meetings involve “private dinners and meetings with political donors, policy sessions with groups of corporate leaders, and ‘drop-bys’ with old Clinton campaign hands and advisers.”

For instance, meetings with controversial Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal are not mentioned, nor are meetings with billionaire Haim Saban, a major donor to Clinton’s political campaigns who also has given at least $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. A Clinton spokesperson says this merely shows that some records are more detailed than others. But AP points out that on the same days the names of donors Clinton meets with are omitted, the names of all the participants in other meetings are given.

Five former State Department logistics officials say that some previous secretaries of state omitted some details from their official calendars, but only for special occasions, such as medical appointments, and not meetings with donors or political interests. It is not known who edited Clinton’s official calendar. It also does not appear any federal laws were broken, although there are department rules against altering or deleting information.

Danielle Brian, executive director of the nonpartisan watchdog group the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), comments: “It’s clear that any outside influence needs to be clearly identified in some way to at least guarantee transparency. That didn’t happen. These discrepancies are striking because of her possible interest at the time in running for the presidency.” (The Associated Press, 6/24/2016)

Former technical director of the National Security Agency (NSA) William Binney (Credit: Democracy Now)

William Binney is a former NSA official who was harassed by the US government for several years for blowing the whistle on a wasteful NSA program. (McClatchy Newspapers, 9/29/2015)

Binney worked at the NSA for 36 years, reaching the position of senior technical director and managing 6,000 employees. He believes Clinton’s poor email security has been “devastating” for US national security due to the revelation of some intelligence collection methods. (Washingtonsblog.com, 7/7/2016)

Binney points in particular to an email sent to Clinton by her confidant Sid Blumenthal on June 8, 2011. It mentioned conversations by rebel generals in Sudan that had taken place less than 24 hours earlier. (US Department of State, 1/6/2016)

This email revealed details of NSA collection abilities, and was based on four NSA reports, all of them classified at the “top secret / special intelligence” (TSSI) level, including at least one issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling code for extraordinarily sensitive information, such as decrypted conversations between top foreign leaders. (The New York Observer, 3/18/2016)

Binney concludes, “All in all, this is a rather devastating compromise of technical capability and a commensurate loss of high value intelligence. … In my view, this is much worse than what Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or any of the other whistleblowers have done. Some are in prison for as many as 35 years. Others have just been ruined and kept from getting anything but menial jobs. But, those in high positions get a pass for much worse offenses.” (Washingtonsblog.com, 7/7/2016)

In the FBI’s Clinton email investigation final report released on this day, the FBI discusses the at least 179 “intelligence memos” Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal emailed to Clinton. Media reports indicate that some memos were accurate and some were totally inaccurate, but none of them were vetted by any US government official, because Blumenthal was and is a private citizen with no security clearance sending the emails directly to Clinton.

An email in which Clinton wanted Sullivan to send a Blumenthal email to Obama, without mentioning who it was from. (Credit: public domain)

According to the FBI report, “Clinton often forwarded the memos to [her aide Jake] Sullivan, asking him to remove information identifying Blumenthal as the originator and to pass the information to other State employees to solicit their input. According to emails between Clinton and Sullivan, Clinton discussed passing the information to the White House, other [US government] agencies, and foreign governments.”